[lbo-talk] Popular causes

[Wojtek S]

Since actual behavior is more indicative of a person's belief system than
than answering surveys, imho, I often watch what people actually do on the
internet to gauge public sentiments.  While it is not "scientific" i.e.
randomly selected I do not think most surveys are "scientific" either,
because of self-selection/non-respone bias and because Rs often give a
specific type of response to influence the survey outcome or perhaps to
please the interviewer instead of reporting their actual views (which often
change due to circumstances.)

I that light, I just stumbled into a new feature of the Firefox browser,
which allows users to select their "personas."  Here is a link to the most
popular personas:
http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/gallery/Causes/Popular/1

It is interesting to see that the broadly defined left-leaning causes, such
as Greenpeace, free marijuana, are the most popular.  Lenin made it to the
top list (12th place -485 users) after Buddha and Jesus.  The nutwing causes
(Nobama and Conservative resistance) are on the bottom of the popularity
list (15 and 10 users) and jointly account only for about a third of the
Lesbian pride users (73.)

In any case, this is most likely indicative of young people's views, since
old farts are less likely to use internet (at least in that way.)

Wojtek